1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless and long distance carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and information content delivery services/providers and long distance carriers. More particularly, it relates to location based services, and most particularly to navigation using location based services.
2. Background of the Related Art
The demand for wireless communication services are ever increasing in response to a society that is becoming increasingly mobile. As a result, wireless devices, and in particular cell phones, have become ubiquitous with day-to-day life. A majority of people in the United States now own cell phones.
Location services are a more recent advanced feature made available for use with wireless devices, perhaps most notably to provide location of a cell phone. The general goal of location-based services is to automatically provide location-based information to a requesting application. The requesting application may be operating on the wireless device itself, or even on an external application running, e.g., on another device in the wireless or other network. Some exemplary applications that use location services include mapping applications that show interesting places in a vicinity of the wireless device's current global position, and navigation from a current location. Location based services are available for wireless devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) as well as for cell phones.
A geospatial entity object code (Geocode) is code that represents a geospatial coordinate measurement of an exact geographic location on (or above, or below) the earth. Many location-based applications on current wireless phones allow a user of the wireless phone to manually input a geocode location, and get in response a location based service, e.g., navigation to a desired destination.
A geocoded representation is derived from latitude, longitude, altitude, date, local time, global time, and other geospatial attributes, e.g., how the area is coded (number, letter, mixture of both, other); which part of the earth is covered (whole earth, land, water, a continent, a country); what kind of area or location is coded (country, county, airport, railstation, city); and/or whether an area or a point is coded.
In practice, a geocoded location may be entered by the name of the location. While entry of a location name is much more user-friendly than an all-natural numerical input relating to latitude, longitude, etc., it is subject to error when input by the user.
FIG. 3 shows a conventional system for assisting a user manually inputting a location name.
In particular, as shown in FIG. 3, a user manually inputs a first letter 301, then a second letter 302, then a third letter 303 of a location name. The conventional system provides possible matches to the first three sequential letters entered by the user, typically presented in alphabetical order.
The conventional system aims to shorten a user's need to enter all letters of a given location name. However, if the user doesn't know how to properly spell the location, particularly in the earliest letters in the location name, the conventional system will not be able to present the user with a small, focused list from which to choose a location. Moreover, if the user has misspelled any letter in the location name, conventional systems quite simply will in fact exclude, rather than include, the intended location name. Furthermore, even with the conventional system aimed at assisting a user to input a geocoded location correctly in the first place, the conventional system has no way of automatically correcting a mistaken geocode once it is entered by the user.
There is a need for an improved location input technique on a wireless phone.